The question, then, is whether or not Destin Daniel Cretton’s new Spider-Man picture, the fourth installment in this series, can keep this positive mojo going. Whereas I’m typically rubbish at the predictive market  —  this is the guy who was convinced Supergirl would do just fine  — if nothing else, the film certainly deserves to be a hit, not something one would have said about many of the more recent bloated, lifeless MCU installments since the groundbreaking Avengers: Endgame back in 2019. 

In writer/director Christopher Nolan’s conceit, this idea of openness and trust was betrayed by Odysseus (Matt Damon), in tricking the Trojans to accept the “gift” of a giant wooden horse, secretly filled to the rim with Greek warriors, all of them furious and miserable after spending the better part of a decade away from home in order to win the war for their king, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). After the appreciative Trojans dragged this giant horse into their city as a symbol of peace with the Greeks, Odysseus and his men snuck out of the structure in the middle of the night, and opened the previously impenetrable Trojan gates in order to let the rest of their army inside, sacking the place in a fury of raping and pillaging. Odysseus won the war, such as it was, but, as Nolan has it, lost a good bit of humanity in the process. 

Hits upon familiar themes and dresses them up in splashy visuals for an ambitious but ordinary adventure.